Ta'amiya Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Ta'amiya is a fritter made from soaked fava beans that are ground to a paste, mixed with herbs, shaped, and deep-fried until crisp. Across Egypt's streets and markets it is an everyday snack, cheap and filling, sold from stands to anyone passing by. It resembles the falafel of the Levant, but where falafel is made from chickpeas, ta'amiya uses fava beans.

The fava bean is a long-established crop of the Mediterranean world, on Egyptian tables from early on. The beans are ground and mixed with herbs, then fried in plenty of hot oil, and the fritters are sold hot from street and market stalls where crowds gather. As a cheap source of protein, it has long been eaten by Egypt's city dwellers, Copts among them.

Falafel and ta'amiya are, in effect, sister dishes that differ only in their bean. Popular history articles often explain that the Egyptian fava-bean version came first, and that as it travelled into the Levant the chickpea took the place of the fava, turning it into falafel. An account by a historian that follows this sequence through the sources has not yet been confirmed, however, and it remains unclear which of the two came first.

Two colourful origin tales cling to ta'amiya. One holds that Coptic Christians devised it as a meat substitute for the Lenten fast; the other, that it reaches back to pharaonic Egypt.

Both the Coptic-fasting story and the ancient-Egypt story are unsupported. That Copts eat this bean fritter during the fasting season is true enough as a present-day custom, and Yael Raviv's study Falafel Nation (2015) is said to touch on the Coptic connection. But a custom kept today is a different matter from the place where a dish was born. No old record of the dish's birth has been found; it appears clearly in writing only in the 19th century, after the British occupation began in 1882. The claim of a pharaonic pedigree comes with no record at all.

The name, too, gives the ancient tales no help. The word ta'amiya derives from the Arabic for 'food', carrying a sense of 'a little morsel', and its root is plain once traced through the dictionaries. The claim that the word comes from Coptic is a popular notion with nothing beneath it.

What, then, is left once the ancient tales are set aside? Claudia Roden, the Cairo-born food writer, is said to record ta'amiya in her 1968 A Book of Middle Eastern Food as an Egyptian dish made from fava beans, though her text itself has not yet been checked. The thread that begins with the fava bean in Egypt and turns into chickpea falafel as it passes into the Levant is a view often told in popular history articles and news reports. Whether historians set out that same sequence in their own works has not yet been confirmed. The ancient stories lack support, yet that does not make Egypt the settled answer. Whether ta'amiya was the original form of falafel is still undecided.